Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Of course it does. Women are being pushed into occuptions where they don't belong and where they don't generally do well.

What's this about "belong"? It's simple aptitude. We have known for a hundred years that women do not perform well on tests of mathemtical ability. And STEM fields have a heavy mathematical requirement. So those who do do well (men) in such fields tend to look down on those who do not (women).

All men (and all women) are NOT equal and ignoring that for the sake of political correctness is always going to create friction. It opposes policy to reality and those who can see the reality will reasonably object.

There is a small minority of females who excel at STEM tasks and it is they alone who should be in such fields. If such women were the only ones is such fields the cause for derision would disappear. Women in such fields would be respected

A PARTICULARLY heinous brand of sexism faced by Australia's most educated woman has been exposed in a damning survey of professional industries including engineering and IT.

Managers in STEM industries (science, technology, engineering and maths) have been revealed to avoid hiring women because they "nag", take on women considering reasons other than their skills and qualifications because they want a "work wife", and prefer men because they can "pee on the run".

The shocking details accompanied by the concerning warning that three quarters of women who work in these areas plan to drop out of their profession within the next five years due to restrictions in career progression.

The claims are included in a submission from industry group Professional Australia to a senate inquiry into gender segregation in the workplace.

The comprehensive submission includes results from a survey undertaken by the professional body, showing that 25.8 per cent of women reported being sexually harassed at work with half taking no action on the matter, and 7 per cent quitting their jobs over it.

Women in the STEM industries reported experiencing bias against women in their male-dominated fields, and described their industry as a "boys club". "Career progression is not always based on merit," one respondent said.

Women reported having to "fight for the pay and respect that men get naturally", and were told to be a "good sport" when on the receiving end of sexist comments.

One employee said women were regularly accused of "nagging" when making reasonable requests of male colleagues, with one recalling being told "you sound like my wife" after requesting overdue information from a male colleague.

"I took over a job on an industrial site from an obviously disliked female employee and on first meeting an operator (was) told `not another f***ing woman, are you here to nag us as well?'" one respondent said.

A female scientist reported opportunities diminished for women in the eyes of male managers once they became more senior. "A lot of scientists like cute student girls," she said. "Once that time period has passed, you are less likely to be offered any roles in anything."

The report also highlighted that women felt sidelined once they had children, with men being considered "more serious about their careers".

One respondent reported being offered a demotion after returning from maternity leave to "help with family flexibility". Another said she was told by a manger if she applied for a job alongside a male of the same age and experience, the male would be selected "as they are less likely to take leave in the future to care for children".

The report showed male engineers earned 24 per cent more than their female colleagues when they worked fulltime, and fulltime male scientists earned 18 per cent more than their female counterparts.

In its submission, Professionals Australia said it hoped shining a light on the issues faced by highly-educated professional women could be addressed.

The group said it wanted to "encourage police-makers and employers to look at ways to tackle gender segregation by looking at the need to address entrenched structural bias in work practices".

"Tackling the issues will be fundamental to providing for the optimal attraction, development and retention of women in the STEM workforce, and to fully realising Australia's productivity potential and innovative capability into the future."

The senate inquiry into gender segregation into the workplace and its impact on women's economic equality is due to report by March this year.

Donald Trump was, in effect, given permission to win by the progressives despite smashing the orthodox bounds of political and policy behaviour

By senior Australian journalist Paul Kelly

As Donald Trump’s new presidency surges across our politics, creating chaos and uncertainty, there is one element in his victory where most Australian politicians remain in ideological denial — the revolt against identity politics.

Trump, in effect, was given permission to win the election by the US progressive class despite his narcissism, his coarseness and his smashing of the orthodox bounds of political and policy behaviour.

In retrospect, the 2016 US election story is a grand joke — enough voters in Middle America decided to tolerate Trump’s juvenile viciousness because they felt the narcissism of prevailing closed-minded progressive ideology was no longer to be tolerated. In the end, the alternative was worse than Trump. Is this too difficult an idea to grasp?

During the Obama era the US underwent a cultural revolution. Fuelled by social activists on race, sex and gender issues and the ­decisive swing by younger people to social liberalism as a way of life, the Democratic Party embraced identity politics as a brand. It mirrored the values transformation that swept through many American institutions: the academy, media, arts, entertainment and much of the high income earning elite. But revolutions are only guaranteed to bring counter-­revolutions in their wake.

Barack Obama won two presidential elections enshrining iden­tity and minority politics at the heart of his campaign. But Obama is a unique historical figure. What works for him doesn’t work for other Democrats — witness Hillary Clinton. In 2016 minority politics failed to deliver. Its momentum has been checked, with American progressives sunk in an angry valley of rage.

Last year Clinton, after a long and often tortuous journey, embraced not a call to all, but a collection of separate identity groups, a pervasive agenda of political correctness and pledges to end discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. This testified to the US Supreme Court decision in favour of same-sex marriage, the injustices visited on African Americans, the voting power of minorities and their ­decisive capture of the soul of the Democratic Party. The problem for the Democrats is now obvious: managing the Obama legacy without the magic of Obama.

This election, beyond its madness, was about a clash of moral ­vision. Trump stood for three ­visions: economic protection against free trade, nationalism against internationalism, and cultural tradition against social liberalism. In Australia there has been immense coverage of Trump’s victory combined with denial of its full meaning. It is a historic failure of progressivism.

In his defining New York Times article of November 18, “The End of Identity Liberalism”, US professor of humanities Mark Lilla said the liberal orthodoxy that ­society should “celebrate” its differences was splendid as moral pedagogy “but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in an ideological age”.

Lilla said: “In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from ­becoming a unifying force capable of governing. One of the many ­lessons of the recent presidential campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity ­liberalism must be brought to an end.”

Lilla, no fan of Trump, said Clinton’s “strategic mistake” was slipping into “the rhetoric of ­diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women at every stop”. It ­became a bigger problem when, having decided to play group politics, she ignored the biggest group: white voters without college degrees. They punted for Trump and who can blame them?

After the result Lilla said American voters were “disaffected with the liberal message”. He said: “Democrats have simply lost the country. They have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly edu­cated.” He said identity liberalism was about self-expression, not persuasion, and claimed that “it’s narcissistic, it’s isolating, it looks within”.

The superficial lesson of the US election is that identity politics failed at the ballot box. That’s ­important. But what’s even more important — for the US and Australia — is that identity politics is bad in its essence, bad for nations, bad for societies and bad for peoples. Identity politics is a far bigger issue in the US than Australia but that does not gainsay this reality.

It goes to the flaw in progressive politics — its blindness to consequences of its policies. This is relevant in Australia given the Labor Party is fully pledged to identity politics as a tactic while for the Greens it is core ideology. The pent-up backlash, however, will come in this country probably sooner rather than later.

Trump, personally liberal in many ways, rode the tide of conservative moral revolt. It was wider and deeper than liberals ­expected because the rising progressive ethos touches virtually every aspect of US life. Progressives misjudged partly because they felt Trump condemned himself as a bigot, sexist and anti-­Muslim extremist.

The genius of Trump’s “make America great again” slogan was that it resonated at multiple levels — with people who saw their jobs and incomes were being eroded along with something even bigger: they felt the values of their America were being stolen, that they were losing their country.

Lilla joins that other brilliant American academic, Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind, whose speeches over the past year are a tour de force in documenting and exposing the crisis in the US university system caused by iden­tity politics.

These speeches are reinforced by Haidt’s 2015 Atlantic magazine article, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, co-authored with constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff, that reveals the ­destructiveness of identity politics.

The key lies in its cultivation of victimhood and the creation of laws, rules and processes to allow victims to pursue and punish the people who have offended them. This vests victims with a superior moral standing, even social status, with the assumption such pro­cesses represent superior public policy and prove the compassion of institutions that embrace these norms.

The argument “I’m offended” is the ultimate card. Once these norms are accepted, it is unbeat­able. This thinking is spreading rapidly into Australian institutions and is embraced by authorities who don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing.

Any Australian politician will gain currency by standing for the victim, winning moral acclaim and usually votes. The great examples are rejecting the same-sex plebiscite because it would offend and hurt gays and lesbians, the insistence under section 18C that people have a right to be offended because of racial comments, and the right of LGBTI students to have the school norms redesigned on gender grounds for self-protection. The principle in each case is the same: the norms of the majority must surrender to the demands of the victimised minority.

Once the victim culture prevails, then notions of morality and decency are redefined. As its scope widens any established idea is vulnerable: that male-female gender norms should be respected, that Australia Day should be kept as January 26 or that the British civilisation heritage should be fundamental to the school curriculum.

While Haidt’s analysis is university-based, it is valuable ­because US universities are the most advanced outreach of iden­tity politics. He argues this transformation weakens the integrity of institutions and damages the precise people it is supposed to protect.

“What has been happening since the 1990s is there’s been a change — the most sacred thing at university is the victim,” Haidt says. “There are six groups of victims traditionally since the 1990s so mostly whenever there are big political blow-ups and controversies they tend to be around race ­issues, gender issues, or LGBT ­issues. Those are the big three. There are three other groups that tend to be sacred but there seems to be less controversy around Latinos, Native Americans and the disabled. The last two years have been extraordinary ­because there’s been a revolution in just two years with a seventh group, now Muslims, in the ­sacred category. You know you’re in the presence of sacredness when any little thing, any affront or insult, elicits a huge reaction.”

Haidt describes how the process works at American univer­sities: “The transition to a victimhood culture is one characterised by concern with status and sensitivity.” The self-declared victim looks to the new norms for satisfaction. “They bring it to the attention of the authorities,” Haidt says. “If something happens, you don’t deal with it yourself. You ­report it. You get the president of the university, the dean, some older person, some bureaucratic authority, to bring them in. To punish the person who did this. In such a culture you don’t emphasise your strengths, rather the ­aggrieved emphasise the repres­sion and their social marginalisation. The only way to gain status is not just to be a victim but to stand up for other victims.”

This is an accurate description of the ethos and operating rules of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

What are the consequences? Haidt says: “Professors are ­increasingly afraid of students. Everybody’s on the Left but they’re increasingly being hauled up for some charge of racism or sexism. Professors all over the country are pulling videos, pulling material. Undergrads are being exposed to far less provocative material in 2016 than they were even in 2014. Just in the last two years professors all over the country are changing their teaching.”

The origins of this cultural sickness are deep and pervasive. Lilla says: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

“At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.

“In large part this is because of high-school curriculums, which anachronistically project the iden­tity politics of today back on to the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country.”

Haidt says that children born after 1980 got a message: “Life is dangerous but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm.” He’s right. But he misses the sharper political point. For progressives, identity politics and victimhood are a wedge to delegitimise leaders and institutions that sustain any conservative status quo against the radical ­social changes they want. This has played out in the politics of both the US and Australia.

Identity politics should be seen in its historical context. It is one manifestation of the chaotic yet momentous embrace of populism on both the Left and Right, fanned by social media, the crisis of traditional values and the debasement of the notion of what is a virtuous person. Emotional self-expression, not piety, is the behaviour that is now rewarded.

Haidt says identity politics is tied to the idea of “emotional reasoning” — or, to be crude, the elevation of emotion over reason. Its essence is: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” Feelings are permitted to guide reality. Lukianoff and Haidt say: “A claim that someone’s words are ‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, ­rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something ­objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker be punished by some authority for committing an offence.”

Emotional reasoning is now evidence; it is seen as illegitimate for an authority or a government to inflict mental or emotional damage on people who constitute a historically repressed minority; subjective evidence of the hurt is all that is required to make the case. Let’s be clear: emotions and claims of mental damage have ­become political weapons to be ruthlessly deployed. This is a core tactic of identity politics.

Bill Shorten grasps this and has used it brilliantly. Shorten and most of his frontbench were ­explicit in their rejection of the same-sex marriage plebiscite: it had to be rejected because of the emotional damage it would do. Shorten said the “No” campaign would be “an emotional torment for gay teenagers” and raised the possibility of suicide. Many mental health clinicians backed him.

These views must be challenged. How healthy was it for the LGBTI community to present ­itself to the Australian public as such entrenched victims that they were unable to sustain a national vote on the marriage issue? Are such individuals better off having embraced this position? Are they better prepared for future life when, in an imperfect world, they will face inevitable discrimination from time to time?

Moving to the central contradiction in identity politics — as rele­vant in Australia as it is in America — Lilla said: “It says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I’ve defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognise me and feel for me.”

Rates of mental illness have been increasing rapidly in both the US and Australia among young people. This is a serious issue but it is being exploited in the cause of ideology. As Haidt says, if young people are taught, encouraged and rewarded “to nurture a kind of ­hypersensitivity” that does not ­assist their lives. On the contrary, this new moral culture advocated by the progressives results in “an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own” while at the same time “it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict”.

Nobody doubts that hurt and offence are genuine and justified across every minority group. That is a fact. But it is not the issue. The issue is the institutional, political and legal response. Haidt argues that the cult of victimhood in law and process “causes a downward spiral of competitive victimhood” and the generation of a “vortex of grievance”. The further tragedy is that victimhood penetrates both sides of the political conflict: men branded as sexist by feminists claim to be victims of ­reverse ­sexism.

Progressives have been setting the cultural agenda in Australia just as they have done in the US: on same-sex marriage, LGBTI rights, gender fluidity programs, social and ideological agendas in schools, the campaign against ­religious freedom, winning more support for affirmative action, radicalising the proposed indigenous referendum, shifting multi­culturalism towards the “diversity” side of the spectrum and deploying anti-discrimination law as an ­instrument of radical social change.

It is futile to think the counter-revolution will not occur. The only issues are its leadership, its rationality and the extent of its conservative or reactionary populism. If Malcolm Turnbull, as Coalition leader, feels this is not his responsibility then the vacuum will be ­occupied by others.

As the two-generations-long campaign in the West for individual human rights reaches its logical cultural conclusion in identity politics, the results are an increasingly fragmented society, the ­decline of a shared historical narrative and a distorted moral order that damages us all.

Long after the West has defeated Islamic State, the jihadist threat will remain.

For the past 40 years, Western immigration policy has been based on multicultural ideology.

Its consequence is clear: Islamism has become a Western condition. Successive governments have diluted Western values to the point where they are no longer taught in schools. The result is a population unschooled in the ­genius of our civilisation whose youth cannot understand why it is worth defending.

Multicultural ideology must give way to a renaissance of Western civilisation in which Australian exceptionalism is celebrated and Islamism is sent packing.

Multiculturalism is not merely the acceptance of diverse cultures, or open society. It is the a priori belief that cultural diversity has a net positive effect on the West, coupled with a double standard that excuses lslamic and communist states from embracing it.

Thus, Western nations must open their borders while Islamic and communist states remain closed. The West must accept the myth that all cultures are equal while Islamic and communist states celebrate their unique contribution to world history. Under multicultural ideology, the greatest civilisation of the world, Western civilisation, is held in contempt while theocratic throwbacks and communist barbarism are extolled.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al- Hussein, regularly frames the West as xenophobic and racist. In a recent speech, he decried xenophobia and religious hatred. But he did not address the Chinese government’s persecution of Christians, or the governing Islamist regime in Gaza, Hamas, for hatred of Jews. Rather, he took aim at the West, saying: “My recent missions to Western Europe and North America have included discussions of increasingly worrying levels of incitement to racial or religious hatred and violence, whether against migrants or racial and religious groups. Discrimination, and the potential for mob violence, is being stoked by political leaders for their personal benefit.”

Western governments should explain why they continue to send taxpayers’ money to the UN when it has become an organisation expressly devoted to defending the interests of Islamist and communist regimes against the free world.

The growing hatred of Western culture goes unremarked by politicians whose populism is firmly rooted in political correctness. No major political party has calculated the cost of multicultural ideology to Western society. Instead, they extol it as a net benefit without tendering empirical evidence. When politicians claim truth without substantive supporting evidence, ideology is at play. It may be that multiculturalism is a net benefit to the West. If so, why has the evidence been withheld? Without it, minor parties can contend that multiculturalism is a net negative for the West and appear credible.

In the absence of empirical proof that multicultural ideology is beneficial, politicians such as Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen seek to curb Muslim immigration and deport those who disrespect Western values. Hanson plans to push for a burka ban in the new year. The policy has international precedent as Dutch politicians voted recently to ban the burka in some public places. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also has proposed a burka ban, but it is reasonable to question her motives ahead of the 2017 election. In a state election held in September, Merkel’s party polled below nationalist and anti-Islam party Alternative for Germany. She has driven porous border policy and repeatedly castigated European heads of state who defend their sovereign borders, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Her call for a burka ban is thus viewed by some as blatant political opportunism.

Malcolm Turnbull addressed the issue indirectly by citing poor border controls in Europe as the cause of the problem. However, as with so many issues concerning political Islam in Australia, the question of a burka ban is indivisible from the defence of Western values.

One such value is the universal application of law that requires the equal treatment of all citizens. If Australians are expected to not wear a balaclava in banks, courts or Parliament House, why are some citizens permitted to cover their faces in a burka or niqab? Double standards and preferential treatment of state-anointed minorities is fuelling widespread, and rational, resentment in the West.

Consider retelling the events of the past week to an Anzac just returned from war. We would tell him that a Muslim married to a terrorist recruiter refused to stand in court because she wanted to be judged by Allah. Muslims in Sydney and Melbourne were charged with preparing a terrorist act against Australians. In France, several people were arrested for plotting jihadist attacks. News broke that 1750 foot soldiers of a genocidal Islamic army had entered Europe without resistance from Western armies. As in Australia, many jihadists entered as refugees and lived on taxpayer-funded welfare under a program called multiculturalism.

In the same week, a German politician called Angela Merkel, who ushered Islamists into the West by enforcing open borders, was lauded by a respected magazine called The Economist as “the last leader of stature to defend the West’s values”. Yet men from Islamic countries who allegedly entered Germany under Merkel’s open-border policy were arrested for sexual assault, including the rape and murder of a teenage girl. Asylum-seekers and refugees had assaulted women and children across Europe. Less than a year before, on New Year’s Eve, Merkel’s asylum-seekers had attacked women and girls en masse.

We would tell the Anzac that Britain attempted to acknowledge the negative impact of its undiscriminating approach to immigration. A review recommended a core school curriculum to promote “British laws, history and values” and a proposal that immigrants sign an oath of allegiance to British values. But secularism, private property and Christianity were absent from the principle list and as such, it wasn’t very British at all.

There were few Anzacs left to see what the West has become. I suppose that’s a kind of mercy. We have dishonoured the millions of soldiers who laid down their lives in the 20th century fighting for our freedom and the future of Western civilisation. We should hang our heads in shame for letting the Anzac legacy come to this. We are the descendants of the world’s most enlightened civilisation. It is our turn to fight for its future.

Trump's immigration crackdown is a clear message to the Muslim world - get your own houses in order before you come to ours

By Katie Hopkins

Have you noticed? There has been more outrage from the left over Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, than over terror itself.

More gnashing of gums and loud wailing, more placards decrying the plight of a few tourists and travellers, than over the bodies blown apart by Islamic extremists at Brussels airport in March last year.

So much collective outrage, in fact, I wonder how on earth a ban imposed by 16 countries on Israeli citizens has remained in place for quite so long with such quiet acceptance.

Curious, isn't it? What liberals will and won't accept.

What is also strange that when I speak to Muslims and ask why they feel the need to flee persecution or seek refuge, I am told it is because Islam is suffering and is incredibly divided. Because the tensions between Sunni and Shia are simply overwhelming.

What stumps me is why non-Muslim countries are expected to welcome such a divided religion with open arms. And if we think about the problems facing Syrian, Iran, Somalia and Yemen and the rest in the context of the US president’s inaugural address, why would America want to keep allowing such division to its shores?

Whether Muslims want to acknowledge it or not, extremists commit atrocities in the name of Allah. They do it according to and in observance of their interpretation of their faith.

What has led us to this latest executive order is not only Islamic extremists knifing, shooting, stabbing and exploding peaceful citizens in the West, but also the abject failure of the wider Muslim community to denounce these vile acts.

It is troubling to many that after each terrorist act there is largely silence from the families and communities that raised the terrorists and from the mosques that they frequented. Imams seldom condemn terror. And in their silence, in the void, acceptance, encouragement even, is assumed.

The typical response in Western Europe is a hashtag, a tea light and a leader, saying their people will not be cowed in the face of terror. Except, they no longer speak for us. We are sick of their platitudes.

The response from the US president is far more reassuring: a ban on travellers from seven Muslim countries and a total ban on refugees and asylum seekers from Syria. Finally, a politician taking action.

Some have questioned why Saudi Arabia has been left off the list. They quote statistics: 15 of the terrorists involved in 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia.

When I ask if they would like Saudi added to the list of banned countries, they say no, appalled at the idea of a ban at all. At which point their argument dies on the spot. Doesn't matter if your country has terror or no terror, they don't agree with a ban. The Saudi argument is a distraction.

They lamely argue for more stringent checks to sift out jihadis. I offer the attacks on Western Europe by Islamic extremists as proof that we are not sophisticated enough to work out who is a jihadi and who is not.

In fact, we have allowed those who travelled to Syria to fight for ISIS to return to our country.

And even when we do know who would wish to hurt our people, the jihadis’ right to privacy and freedom trumps our right to safety or life.

In its wild lament, the left has missed the point entirely. Trump is sending out a message. His 90-day ban on seven Muslim countries is in place to achieve one thing and one thing only: Trump wants you to understand America has borders, and from now on it’s going to protect them.

He is going to build a wall with Mexico. He is going to reinforce Homeland Security. He is pouring funds into the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement services.

And thanks to the outrage, the placard-waving protests, the Clinton News Network and the Biased Broadcasting Corporation, you all know about it. So everyone is now clear. Perfect.

All those desperate to get into the country, to get back to work or to their brothers or sisters in America originally from Iran, their daughter who has dual US-Yemeni nationality, or their American-Somali mother based in California — they now have 90 days to reflect.

To think about how lucky they are to have a home in the land of the free. How fortunate they are to live in a country where democracy works and laws are made by the will of the people, not religion.

Trump said, 'We only want to admit those who will support our country and love deeply our people.'

Think of it less as a Muslim ban, and more as an American invitation. If you support America and will put America first, you will be welcome.

If you cannot bring yourself to condemn the actions of those who commit terror in the name of your god, probably best stay in what's left of your home.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Monday, January 30, 2017

Toxicity knows no bounds when it comes to feminists raising children. If you care about the future you must take a stand against feminist parenting.

Trump-Hating Protestors, Deceit and Willful Blindness

Unveiling the Left's lies about immigration, drugs and terrorism

On January 20, 2017, the very same day that President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, protestors who opposed Trump's election and his campaign promises took to the streets in Washington, DC and elsewhere. They falsely equated securing America's borders and enforcing our immigration laws with bigotry and racism.The protestors carried signs with a variety of slogans including a slogan favored by Hillary Clinton during her failed bid for the presidency, "Build bridges, not walls."

Where were these protestors when Obama violated the Constitution, released hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens, commuted the sentences of record numbers of drug dealers and ignored the findings of the 9/11 Commission and imported millions of foreign workers to take Americans' jobs?

Ironically, on that same day, the Justice Department issued a press release, "Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera Faces Charges in New York for Leading a Continuing Criminal Enterprise and other Drug-Related Charges."

El Chapo was the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel that smuggled multi-ton quantities of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States and used extreme violence and corruption in order to achieve their criminal goals that included the smuggling of huge quantities of illegal drugs into the United States.

The press release contains links to the Detention Memo and the Indictment and begins with these two paragraphs:

The indictment alleges that between January 1989 and December 2014, Guzman Loera led a continuing criminal enterprise responsible for importing into the United States and distributing massive amounts of illegal narcotics and conspiring to murder persons who posed a threat to Guzman Loera's narcotics enterprise.

Guzman Loera is also charged with using firearms in relation to his drug trafficking and money laundering relating to the bulk smuggling from the United States to Mexico of more than $14 billion in cash proceeds from narcotics sales throughout the United States and Canada. As part of this investigation, nearly 200,000 kilograms of cocaine linked to the Sinaloa Cartel have been seized. The indictment seeks forfeiture of more than $14 billion in drug proceeds and illicit profits.

Leaders of Drug Trafficking Organizations, alien smuggling rings and terrorists seeking to enter the United States surreptitiously could not devise a better slogan than "Build bridges not walls" to promote their criminal interests.

Perhaps, given the numerous reports about tunnels under the U.S./Mexican border, the open borders/immigration anarchists should amend their signs to read, "Build bridges and tunnels not walls."

That slogan must really resonate with El Chapo the leader of the violent Sinaloa Mexican Drug Trafficking Organization that, not unlike other such cartels, required the ability to cross the U.S./Mexican border to not only transport their drugs but their "employees" into the United States as well.

These cartel "employees" are primarily aliens who enter the United States illegally. Among them as noted in the criminal indictment, are "sicarios," or hit men who carried out hundreds of acts of violence, including murders, assaults, kidnappings, assassinations and acts of torture at the direction of the defendants.

Often the victims of the violence are members of the ethnic immigrant communities in which these thugs operate.

The majority of violent crime in the United States has a nexus to the use and/or trafficking in narcotics and dangerous drugs. The proceeds of the drug trade enriches the drug cartels and street gangs. This fast flow of money also enriches terror organizations around the world.

All too often those who become addicted to drugs have bleak futures. Tragically, often these addicts are teenagers.The magnitude of the quantity of drugs smuggled into the United States across the U.S./Mexican border and through other means (in the holds of ships and in the cargo holds of airliners and in the baggage and secreted on passengers of airliners) is, in the aggregate, truly staggering.

El Chapo is being prosecuted in the Eastern District of New York because of the magnitude of his wholesale operations in New York City. The Sinaloa Cartel also operated in Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and throughout parts of Arizona.

The magnitude and scope of the violence used by the Sinaloa Cartel was staggering and the press release noted that thousands of individuals were killed in Mexico to eliminate those who got in their way.

They killed law enforcement officials and others to intimidate those who would compete against this criminal organization or cooperate with law enforcement. Many of the victims were beheaded as an intimidation tactic.

This investigation was conducted by courageous law enforcement officers in Colombia, Mexico, the United States and elsewhere. In the United States the investigation was pursued by the multi-agency Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) that includes agents of the DEA, FBI, ICE, ATF as well as members of local and state police departments.

Having spent the final ten years of my career with the INS assigned to OCDETF I am extremely familiar with the effectiveness of the multiagency task force approach to the investigation and dismantling of late-scale narcotics trafficking organizations and just how critical border security and effective enforcement of our nation's immigration laws, from within the interior of the United States, are to the success of these law enforcement efforts.

Incredibly, however, when Donald Trump promised to build a wall to secure the border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico to prevent criminals, terrorists and drugs from entering the United States, the globalists, aided and abetted by dishonest journalists, created the false narrative equating Trump's goals and the goals of Americans who demand that our borders be secured against illegal entry with racism.

Securing our borders against illegal entry is not to be equated with preventing all aliens from entering the United States, only those aliens who violate our laws.

The doors on our homes have locks that can be unlatched not only so that we can enter our own homes, but so that we can selectively open our doors to those who wish to visit us.

However sensible people lock their doors to prevent the entry of burglars and those who might pose a threat to their safety.

This is comparable to the mission of the inspections process conducted at ports of entry by the more than 20,000 inspectors of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) the same agency that employs approximately 20,000 Border Patrol agents to attempt to interdict those aliens who seek to avoid the inspections process by running our borders.

Determinations as to the admissibility of aliens seeking entry into the United States is guided not by race, religion or ethnicity as politicians, pundits and pollsters falsely claim, but by the provisions of Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens.

Jimmy Carter created the Orwellian term "Undocumented Immigrant" to describe illegal aliens that has, over time, enabled immigration anarchists to con many Americans into believing that deporting illegal aliens actually refers to deporting all "immigrants."

For the sake of clarity, the difference between and immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar.

However, while the protestors demonstrate and engage in free speech, they need to be mindful that a one-sided conversation is not a conversation.

When news organizations provide only one side of the debate and, indeed, create a false narrative under the guise of the First Amendment, they are doing a huge disservice to their profession and to America and Americans.

How many of the protestors who demanded that we "build bridges not walls" would have participated in the demonstration carrying those signs, if the organizations, faculty members of universities and teachers in our nation's schools would truly honor the First Amendment by ending "Safe Spaces" and encouraging and fostering honest and open debates to provide Americans with a vital but increasingly rare commodity: The Truth?

It is unfathomable that hundreds of thousands of people, many of them parents, would protest on behalf of El Chapo and others engaged in the drug trade to facilitate the trafficking or narcotics in the United States and the violent crimes and malevolent transnational gangs associated with the drug trade. Yet, unwittingly, this is precisely what they are doing.

It is equally likely that the numbers of such protestors would have been greatly reduced if the media and our politicians had honestly reported on the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission when reporting on the threat of terrorism and its nexus to failures of the immigration system.

Yet there they were, demanding that our borders be left vulnerable and our immigration laws not be enforced."Free speech" does not protect individuals who falsely cry, "Fire!" in a crowded theater to spark a stampede.

Memo to professors, journalists, pollsters and politicians: It is time for honest speech.

When I first received notification that Rabbi Marvin Hier had been invited to offer a prayer at the Trump inauguration on February 20th, I wrote an article in which I elaborated upon the courage required to accept this invitation. You never saw the article because I decided not to publish it. After seeing the interviews with Rabbi Hier on television and in the press, I felt that he had so clearly explained his decision, that my comments were superfluous. He was unequivocal about his love of the United States and his respect for the US presidency as the pinnacle of its democracy. He has always been vocal on his commitment to the survival of the Jewish people.

In the meantime, the inaugural prayers have been delivered and his choice of passages from Torah and Psalms were poignant. They were messages that a large segment of the world did not want to hear.

Have there been complaints made about the prayers of the four Christian ministers who blessed the future president of the United States calling on their savior in the process? If so, I have missed them. Who exactly is so irate at the words of Torah spoken by Rabbi Hier on that moment in history? There are two distinct groups of haters. First there are the classic Anti-Semites who would simply be upset to see any Rabbi held in great respect appearing on the inaugural platform. But there is an additional audience to consider. Am I the only viewer who noticed that there were no Muslim clergy invited to speak? I am fairly sure that every Muslim around the world, received the message of their irrelevance to the founding fathers of the United States, and to its constitution quite simply by this omission. Let us examine my premise more closely:

One must only look at the words that Rabbi Hier emoted to understand why he selected them, and why others found them dangerous. “By the rivers of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem may my right hand forget its skill.” This prayer has become emblazoned in the heart of every religious Jew for the past three thousand years. Those who have aligned themselves against the Jewish State and the Jewish people, began a calculated campaign to rewrite Jewish History.

Devised by Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian authority, it has focused on trying to prove that the Jewish people have no historic or religious connection to their land. This 3,000-year-old biblical prayer referring to the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish people, contradicts their revisionism. Their incremental political successes in this effort have brought forth illegitimate UNESCO resolutions with false claims that the Jewish people have no connection to their holiest religious site, the Temple Mount and to their holy city. The recent Paris Conference attempted to validate the calculated lie that Jews have no rights whatsoever to Jerusalem’s Old City — in spite of massive historic evidence to the contrary.

Rabbi Hier’s quotes from the Old Testament (known by Jews world-wide as the Torah) are proof once again that the home of the Jewish faith is and has always been in Jerusalem, and is actually on the very Temple Mount which has been stolen from Jewish heritage by the Jordanians . The building of the Dome of the Rock on this specific location was and remains an insult to the Jewish world. In spite of this, Israel protects the site and the rights of Moslems to pray there in safety. In agreeing to allow the Temple Mount to stay in Arab hands, Moshe Dayan took it upon himself to acquiesce to Arab demands in a futile effort for mutual respect and co-existence. It was in essence, the first “land for Peace” swap. Dayan was not a religious man, but a General and an archaeologist who did not understand the damage that his concessions would impose on the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

The online vilification of Rabbi Hier’s speech and of the man himself came from cowards who would never have the courage to confront the rabbi in person. The internet potential for rebellion brings rabid anti-Semites out from their hiding places and gives them a voice with anonymity. This is not the first time he has been threatened. After more than thirty years of association with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, I know firsthand how much courage it requires to stand up for Tolerance in a world of prejudice. As the founder and dean of very organization which has fought bigotry among different ideologies and religions throughout the world, he has met with every major leader in the free world. His efforts intended to bring human beings of varying cultures together, with respect and understanding of their differences.

This same man is now receiving hate mail for defending his own people and their own land. Even some individuals who understand the horrors of the Holocaust, and who support his institution, are so afraid of the new president, that they are apologetic and embarrassed when this rabbi stands up for his own beliefs. History has taught them little.

Social media has given power to the cowards. It has given platforms to the haters. It has given anonymity to those who purport one goal, but have their secret agendas. We live in dangerous times where the public is being manipulated by individuals looking to mobilize individuals for their own purposes. We need to look carefully before joining mass events which purport to have one goal, but which are led by those who wish to cause unrest, discontentment and an American version of the “Arab-Spring” on the streets of great cities throughout the free world. Riots have been mobilized against police forces and inspired the murder of innocents.

Organizations such as “Black lives Matter” altered their agenda midstream to become a support base for the Palestinian cause, and the Women’s March on Washington is led by a woman who believes in Shariah law, which oppresses women world-wide. It becomes increasingly important for each citizen of every nation, to investigate carefully which organizations and events they support. Allowing one’s self to be used as a pawn in a larger game, is naive and dangerous.

We are living in complicated times, where what seems simple and straight forward, often is not. What appears pure may well be polluted. It is time to sit back and reassess. Arabic social media was used successfully to create havoc in the Middle East. Those who wish the same for the Democratic nations will use similar techniques to create discontent and anarchy. The past Presidential campaign was fertile ground for haters of every description to express their frustrations.

Anger from those who see life in its terms of “them” and “us” has come forth now, simply because of a prayer offered in the hope that the new President of the United States will succeed and stand up for that which is right and just. When in American history did a prayer ever become an excuse to express hate and vilify a respected man of G-d?” The times they are a-changing.”

Punching political opponents is the kind of thing you would think gets relegated to third world nations, brand-new democracies and college frat parties. Not any more. During the insane left-wing inaugural protests, white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched in the face. Salon noted that “many find it fun to watch someone who did a Hitler salute on stage get clocked.”

The problem with that idea is when your side views everyone who opposes them as Nazis or Hitler that rationalizes political terrorism, which is precisely what the left does, like this cartoon from Alternet depicting the attacker as a modern day Capt. America.

Salon cover editor Jeremy Binckes (who looks like he is on his way to his very own Bund meeting) tried to make light of a serious and scary topic. Actual quote: “Maybe the question shouldn’t be, ‘Is it OK to punch a Nazi?’ but, ‘If you don’t want to be punched in the face, maybe you shouldn’t preach Nazi values to the public?’”

Binckes

He wrote this after having done his part to preach Nazi values. Because beating up political opponents is precisely what the Nazis did in 1930s Germany. It’s wrong, even when it’s someone awful like Spencer. Because next time it might be you.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

How Liberals Really Feel About Black People

Liberal "elitist" students in the bastion of Liberal Hypocrisy – U.C. Berkeley – were asked about voter ID laws and black people. Then, "blacks" in Harlem, NY were asked their thoughts on what they just heard. Boom! Liberal lies and looney-bin "logic" exposed and utterly devastated!

‘Let’s stand together and halt eclipse of the West,’ says British PM to Trump

Theresa May offered to help President Trump to prevent the West from being “eclipsed” by China last night as she urged him not to shirk his “obligation” to lead the world.

In a speech to a Republican congressional retreat in Philadelphia the prime minister matched parts of Mr Trump’s controversial foreign policy.

She criticised China’s increasingly “assertive” posture, promised to help to curb Iran’s “malign influence” in the Middle East and to do more to defend allies such as Israel in “tough neighbourhoods” while admitting that it was time to engage Russia in the search for peace in Syria.

Mrs May offered an updated edition of the special relationship, one that would be shorn of illusions about “making the world in our image” and without the baggage of “failed” interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her central message, however, was that Mr Trump, whom she will meet on Friday night, had an obligation to accept US responsibility to take an active role in the world. She called on him to assume the “mantle of leadership”.

“An emboldened, confident America is good for the world, a nation that is strong and prosperous at home is one that can lead abroad,” she said. “We — our two countries together — have a joint responsibility to lead. Because when others step up as we step back, it is bad for America, for Britain and the world.”

She insisted that China’s economic rise, along with that of India, was hugely welcome because billions were lifted out of poverty and new export markets were created. However, she also said that China had little tradition of democracy, liberty and human rights and there was no guarantee that it would acquire one.

China’s rise, she said, coming at the same time as the financial crisis and a loss of confidence after 9/11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had led many to fear that “we will experience the eclipse of the West”.

“But there is nothing inevitable about that,” she added. “Other countries may grow stronger. Big, populous countries may grow richer. And as they do so, they may start to embrace more fully our values of democracy and liberty.

“But even if they do not, our interests will remain. Our values will endure. And the need to defend them and project them will be as important as ever.”

Mrs May was met with cheers and rapturous applause. Observers confirmed that her speech had been well received. It appeared to mark a shift towards the US and away from efforts, led by George Osborne, to foster a “golden age” in relations with China. Beijing officials, nettled by her decision to pause the Hinckley C nuclear power plant, were growing increasingly frustrated at the apparent indifference towards them by No 10.

Senior political figures told The Times that Beijing had complained that Chinese diplomats had been blocked from seeing Nick Timothy, one of Mrs May’s chiefs of staff, in recent weeks. A Downing Street source disputed that.

Mrs May said that it was right to “engage” Russia in the search for a peaceful solution to Syria, marking the latest stage of a gradual retreat from Britain’s hardline stance. “There is nothing inevitable about conflict between Russia and the West,” she said. “And nothing unavoidable about retreating to the days of the Cold War. But we should engage with Russia from a position of strength.”

In her strongest language yet on Tehran she said that she was committed to reducing “Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East”. Her rhetoric, however, prefaced strong support for the nuclear deal that it signed with world powers last year.

Mr Trump has described the agreement as “the worst deal ever” and threatened to scrap it. Mrs May said: “The agreement must now be very carefully and rigorously policed — and any breaches should be dealt with firmly and immediately.”

Mrs May’s aides emphasised that she was appearing at the Republicans’ retreat as a Conservative Party leader. She underscored the shared values that she said bound the parties together after Brexit vote and US election. She said that Mr Trump’s victory had been “achieved in defiance of all the pundits and the polls and [was] rooted not in the corridors of Washington, but in the hopes and aspirations of working men and women across this land”.

Asked on the flight to the US in what way the outcome of the Brexit vote was similar to Mr Trump’s victory she said: “I think we both share a desire to ensure that governments are working for everyone and particularly that governments are working for ordinary working families and working-class families.”

Last August, Kellyanne Conway told Donald Trump she would not call him by his first name.

Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Conway says that she told then-candidate Trump her reasoning for this in 2016 when she was hired as Trump's campaign manager.

"I told him when he offered me the job, the very last thing I said to him was I don't consider myself to be your peer, and I will not call you by your first name. And some of the feminists may go crazy…but it's called respect, and it's called deference, and it's called hierarchy."

The profile in the Reporter by Michael Wolff goes on to describe Conway, who is now an advisor to President Trump, in military terms:

In sum, if Donald Trump is going to war with the media — if he is to continue his war — Kellyanne Conway will be both his general and, likely, his cannon fodder. In this role, she has become an extraordinary focus of liberal rage in "the public cesspool that is Twitter," whose users refer to her, she summarizes, as "ugly, stupid, liar, meth queen." She is the kind of weapon that causes media heads to blow up in incredulity and frustration. Asked about the recent social media campaign for a news program boycott of her as a guest, Conway replied, "I can put my shoes and panty hose back on and go on any show at any time."

Conway added, "I am just trying to stand up to the cacophony, sameness and myopia of the media world."

Wolff also notes the reaction that occurred when Conway visited Michael’s a New York restaurant that is popular with the media:

A few weeks ago, when Conway paid her first visit to Michael's restaurant, the media canteen on West 55th Street in New York, the front room — always a study in power dynamics — fell into a kerfuffle. Charlie Rose, at an adjacent table, shifted his chair around to Conway's party. Former New York politician and current socialite Andy Stein tried to invite her to an event. Washington lawyer and Obama book agent Bob Barnett lingered a bit too long at Conway's table. Tom Rogers, former head of TiVo, hastened to recall a meeting he had with Conway more than 10 years ago (she remembered it, too). Equally, a prominent advertising executive at a nearby table, himself an adviser to Republican presidents, said, as he looked at her with intent fascination, "I can't even look at her."

Liberals love to pretend they are nice and tolerant, until you take a closer look at how they talk in their own world. They love to mock people who live in a “cisgender normative society” – in other words, normal.

Another word they deploy to bash opponents is “breeder.” Urban Dictionary calls it a slang term, “used by people of homosexual persuasion to refer to heterosexual couples.” But it’s what liberals would call hate speech if our side used it. “A female breeder is commonly called a moo, and a male breeder a duh.”

Yeah, perfectly nice. So when Salon runs, “Thirtysomething, bisexual, single and satisfied: Your breeder friends can’t bear it,” you know the agenda. Actual quote: “If I’m not intentional about how I apportion time and on whom I focus, I wind up spending a majority of my life immersed in a sanctioned heterosexual culture that at best I can’t relate to whatsoever and at worst I find patriarchal and oppressive.”

The article is full of alt-left whining about the “erasure of non-conformist identities” and “structural oppression.” Mostly it’s just a long sip of bitter whine as the author copes with a liberal midlife crisis. But it’s filled with left-wing catchphrases and a nice peak at the lefty world.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Friday, January 27, 2017

Donald Trump's New Culture War

The nation’s foremost culture warrior is President Donald J. Trump.

He wouldn’t, at first blush, seem well-suited to the part. Trump once appeared on the cover of Playboy. He has been married three times. He ran beauty pageants and was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show. His “locker-room talk” captured on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape didn’t, shall we say, demonstrate a well-honed sense of propriety.

There is no way Trump could be a credible combatant in the culture war as it existed for the past 40 years. But he has reoriented the main lines of battle away from issues related to religion and sexual morality onto the grounds of populism and nationalism. Trump’s culture war is fundamentally the people versus the elite, national sovereignty versus cosmopolitanism, and patriotism versus multiculturalism.

It’s the difference, in a nutshell, between fighting over gay rights or immigration, over the breakdown in marriage or Black Lives Matter. The new war is just as emotionally charged as the old one. It, too, involves fundamental questions about who we are as a people, which are always more fraught than the debate over the appropriate tax rate or whether or not we should have a defense sequester.

The participants are, by and large, the same as well. The old culture war featured Middle America on one side, and coastal elites, academia and Hollywood on the other. So does the new war. And while Trump has no interest in fighting over gay marriage or engaging in the bathroom wars, his staunch pro-life position is a notable holdover from the old war.

Yet any of his detractors who is warning, out of reflex more than anything else, of an attempt to control women’s bodies or establish a theocracy is badly out of date. Donald Trump has many ambitions, but imposing his morality on anyone clearly isn’t one of them.

Instead, he wants to topple a corrupt establishment that he believes has put both its selfish interests and a misbegotten, fuzzy-headed altruism above the well-being of the American people. This isn’t just a governing program, but a culture crusade that includes a significant regional and class element. It channels the concerns of the Jacksonian America that is Trump’s base and, as Walter Russell Mead writes in an essay in Foreign Affairs, “felt itself to be under siege, with its values under attack and its future under threat.”

The revolt of the Jacksonians as exemplified in Trump’s presidency sets up a cultural conflict as embittered as any we’ve experience in the post-Roe v. Wade era. “If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic,” Mead writes, “Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous — people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.”

This backdrop will add intensity to almost every fight in the Trump years. Consider the president’s war with the media. Almost all Republicans have testy relationships with the press. For Trump, though, the media are something more than a collection of biased outlets; they are a particularly noxious, high-profile expression of exactly the Northeastern elite that he seeks to dethrone.

On the other side of the ledger, it’s nothing new for those occupying the commanding heights of our culture to accuse of Republicans of being narrow-minded and bigoted, but the level of vitriol will be elevated to meet Trump’s frontal challenge.

His emphasis on borders, cultural coherence, law and order and national pride will engender a particular fear and loathing. It is an article of faith among the cultural elite that these priorities — despite what they consider the aberration of November’s election — are the relics of a rapidly disappearing America that can’t possibly represent the country’s future. Trump and his supporters beg to differ.

A majority of Americans are in favor of stopping taxpayer funding of abortions and banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to a new Marist poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus.

“There is a consensus in America in favor of significant abortion restrictions, and this common ground exists across party lines, and even among significant numbers of those who are pro-choice,” Carl A. Anderson, CEO of the Catholic organization Knights of Columbus, said in a statement.

“This poll shows that large percentages of Americans, on both sides of the aisle, are united in their opposition to the status quo as it relates to abortion on demand. This is heartening and can help start a new national conversation on abortion.”

When polled, 61 percent of Americans opposed using tax dollars to fund abortions within the United States, while 83 percent of respondents opposed subsidizing abortions outside of the United States.

When it came to the partisan breakdown of individuals polled, 41 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans opposed using taxpayers’ money to fund abortions.

Large majorities of the Marist poll’s respondents supported significant restrictions on abortion, including banning the practice after 20 weeks, unless the mother’s life is in danger.

The poll found that 85 percent of Americans supported some restrictions on abortion.

“It’s also worth pointing out, we have 74 percent of all Americans who support these [significant] restrictions and 77 percent of women who would support these restrictions,” Andrew Walther, the vice president of communications and strategic planning for Knights of Columbus, said in a conference call to reporters.

Walther added:

We’ve been doing this now going back to 2008, asking Americans what kind of restrictions they would support on abortion, and what we found here, as in previous years, was an overwhelming support for limiting abortion to at most the first three months of pregnancy, with substantial support for limiting it to cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

The Marist poll’s numbers, showing the majority of Americans support some sort of restriction on abortion, were released during the same week as the annual March for Life event, an annual pro-life event that meets in the District of Columbia.

Additionally, on Monday, Donald Trump reinstated a policy that specifies that federal funds designated for family planning can only be used to support foreign nongovernmental organizations that will not promote or perform abortions in foreign countries.

The Marist poll sponsored by the Knights of Columbus was conducted between Dec. 12 and Dec. 19, 2016. The survey included responses from 2,729 adults living within the continental United States and has a margin of error of ±1.9 percentage points.

Police have charged a Canadian man with assault after he was caught on video at the Edmonton, Alberta, Woman’s March punching a camera held by a female conservative reporter who said the camera subsequently hit her in the face.

Sheila Gunn Reid, Alberta bureau chief for Rebel Media, was covering the Saturday march and said she tried to interview Bews, who became indignant — and soon violent.

“Go away,” Bews said to Reid, who was shooting video of Bews from her tripod-mounted camera. “Get out of my f***ing face. I will break your f***ing camera.”

A few women there attempted to calm things and apparently blocked Reid as Bews walked off through the crowd — and Reid was furious: “Hey, don’t tell me to calm down! That guy just hit me in the face!”

One woman told Reid, “You deserve to be angry. You deserve to be angry. But I’m trying to make sure nothing else happens.”

Reid in a later video report said that the “left-wing women there helped him get away,” adding that “there was one woman there who said I was the problem. There was another man who said I provoked it all. There was another who said I incited it. One woman even blocked my camera with her sign so I couldn’t film the little puke coward running way.”

“Yeah, I’m the problem you victim-blamer!” Reid told those protecting the man in the raw video.

Ezra Levant, founder of the Rebel, told Metro News “there’s something weird going on at a women’s march when a man assaults a woman and the reaction of the assembled marchers is to assist him in scurrying away and to denounce the victim.”

CTV News reported earlier that Bews spoke with the network on Monday and said he talked to police and that he wouldn’t face charges.

CTV News added that Bews said he didn’t hit Reid in the face, just her camera — and that he doesn’t believe the camera hit Reid.

Bews added to the network that apologized via a tweet and said he’d replace the camera — and that he and his wife left their home due to threats via texts, phone calls and emails.

Two people who said they saw the incident disputed Reid’s claim and said she was never hit.

“He just hit the camera off the tripod … [he] didn’t actually assault her in any way,” a self-proclaimed witness who called herself Tiana said in a Facebook video.

“Had she been hit, there would have been a reaction,” said the other self-proclaimed witness, who called himself Ezra.

Bews’ violent behavior drew scorn from a couple of female Canadian columnists.

Danielle Paradis wrote that his “few short moments of ego” threw the work of the Women’s March into jeopardy:

The fact is the behaviour Bews displayed on the tape isn’t OK and you’d think a participant at a women’s march would have the wherewithal to know why.

When the cause is women’s rights that means you respect all women at the rally — whatever their reasons for attending, whatever their demeanour. If that’s too difficult, maybe you don’t belong there.

The sad irony is that it’s often violence against women that causes trouble at progressive events. In the hundreds of Occupy camps, incidents of violence and sexual assault against women were well reported. Indeed, reports of men raping or groping women in the tents in New York’s Zuccoitti Park was a part of the justification for shutting down the camps.

Candice Malcolm wrote that “modern feminism is no longer an inclusive movement to protect and improve the lives of all women.”

New feminism has morphed into an anti-Western, anti-conservative ideology. It aims to undermine men—especially straight, white men—and fight against “the patriarchy,” that is, the traditional institutions of society, like the family, marriage, religion and even the economy.

Malcolm added: “Some men — weak men like Dion Bews — use violence to intimidate and assert power over women.”

And new feminism bizarrely enables this behaviour, ironically, even a rally for women’s rights. Both at the rally, and later online, many on the left have rushed to defend Bews.

These leftist feminists have shown their true colours. They’ve demonstrated that feminism isn’t about women, it’s about politics – where a feminist man, even a violent one, comes ahead of a conservative woman.

This is the regressive left, the real source of violence and intolerance in our society.

TheBlaze’s Mike Opelka interviewed Reid on the radio, and she said Bews is a “beta male” who on Tuesday “turned himself in out of complete and utter fear.”

Remember Ned Ludd from your grade-school history lessons? He was the Occupy Wall Street agitator of his time — a phantom leader of early 19th-century British textile workers who vindictively smashed spinning jenny power looms to bits in a desperate bid to halt technological progress.

Now, it's radical feminists hysterically stoking fear and loathing of machines. Revolutionary developments in sonography have endangered their agenda of unrestricted abortion on demand, at all times, no questions asked. The popular diagnostic tools that give parents and doctors around the world an increasingly vivid window to the womb fundamentally undermine Planned Parenthood's dehumanizing propaganda.

With more and more pregnant women over the past three decades changing their minds about abortion after seeing and hearing the life growing inside of them, the peeved pussyhat brigade is on a mission:

Ultrasounds. Must. Be. Stopped.

The latest salvo in the wimmin's war on sinister sonograms? It's a doozy of a screed this week published by Moira Weigel, "writer and a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University," in the Atlantic Monthly magazine originally titled, "How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea that a Fetus is a Person."

What a patriarchal jerk, that insidious Mr. Ultrasound is, pushing around such sexist lunacy as the idea that unborn babies are alive!

The original subheading of the article is even better (er, worse): "The technology has been used to create an imaginary 'heartbeat' and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus."

Weigel sneered that "there is no heart to speak of" in a six-week-old fetus and used "heartbeat" in scare quotes to assert her scientific authority. She similarly employed those scare quotes to deride "life," "baby" and "baby bump."

After actual medical experts and parents exposed Weigel's Neanderthal ignorance of basic embryology, the ridiculous claim was removed and a sheepish noncorrection correction appeared at the end of the biology denier's piece for the once-august Atlantic Monthly.

"This article originally stated that there is 'no heart to speak of' in a six-week-old fetus," the editors' note admitted. "By that point in a pregnancy, a heart has already begun to form. We regret the error." (Read it in smarty-pants "Saturday Night Live" character Emily Litella's "Neeever mind" voice for full effect.)

Next in the anti-science Atlantic's investigative series: How X-rays pushed the idea that humans have skeletons! How microscopes pushed the idea that microorganisms exist! How electroencephalograms pushed the idea that human brains send electrical impulses! A deep dive by the intrepid Weigel into the world of "imaginary" bones, bacteria and beta waves will no doubt yield a Pulitzer nomination if not a Nobel Prize.

Curiously, Weigel raised no objection to the appalling use of ultrasound by Planned Parenthood operatives to harvest unborn baby parts. In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress exposed how Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the abortion giant's senior director, boasted of using "ultrasound guidance" to improve the quality of coveted organs ("a lot of people want liver"). Ultrasound machines helped their harvesters "know where they're putting their forceps" to score better prices.

"We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver," Dr. Nucatola chirped, "because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact."

Ironically enough, we don't need ultrasound to see quite clearly, through the ghoulish words and barbaric deeds of abortion zealots like Quack Doctor Wanna-be Weigel and Dr. Nucatola, that having a heart doesn't always guarantee humanity.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

The NYT on the Bible

We read:

"But the deep divide over gay rights remains one of the most contentious in American politics. And the murder of 49 people in an Orlando gay club has, in many cases, only exacerbated the anger from Democrats and supporters of gay causes, who are insisting that no amount of warm words or reassuring Twitter posts change the fact that Republicans continue to pursue policies that would limit legal protections for gays and lesbians.

In the weeks leading up to the killings, they pointed out, issues involving gays were boiling over in Congress and in Republican-controlled states around the country. More than 150 pieces of legislation were pending in state legislatures that would restrict rights or legal protections for sexual minorities. A Republican congressman read his colleagues a Bible verse from Romans that calls for the execution of gays. Congress was considering a bill that would allow individuals and businesses to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples"

Romans chapter 2 in fact says that we should not judge homosexuals and other sinners. It is for God to punish them

Yesterday’s “women’s marches” in the US and around the world were, at their core, anti-democratic. This was just mass petulance.

Sure, everyone has a right to protest. But this wasn’t about anything President Donald Trump has done: he was only installed on Friday.

These protesters were stomping their feet at the outcome of the election. Everyone hates losing and elections are important but there are always losers.

Smashed windows and burned cars on Friday, chanting crowds and ranting pop stars on the weekend, but Trump is still President.

We’ve had silly debates about comparative crowd sizes (parade envy?) and fake news stories about a bust of Martin Luther King being moved from the White House (it wasn’t) and, yes, some of this nonsense has been fuelled by the President himself.

But such media sideshows, aimed at mocking Trump, tend to fuel his support outside the Beltway. They amplify his core message — the theme of his inauguration address — that an outsider has moved in to shake up the Washington political and media establishment.

There wasn’t one clear policy or action the weekend protesters were rallying against. They are united against the Trump presidency — the vibe of the thing.

Fair enough — they all have the right — but the time to stir up opposition to Trump was in the lead-up to the election. A mass movement of people marching to polling booths in Democrat states won by the Republican nominee would have made a difference.

Not enough of them were enthused about Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, who was, at best, pedestrian, offering only more of the same.

So the political imperative for the protests was belated, on the one hand: the election is done. And it was premature, on the other: Trump hasn’t done anything yet.

There was, of course, the feminist element — these were women’s marches. Clinton lost the election to a man who, on any objective level, lacked the political experience or character traits to make him an ideal candidate.

The fact Trump was able to win was an indictment on Clinton herself and her campaign. She chose to run in large part on identity — vote for me because I am a woman — and this didn’t work with enough women, let alone men. Yet she is offered up as the martyr.

(Many Trump critics point to the popular vote — winning that has never been the aim of the US presidential contest. So campaigns are tuned to winning individual states rather than a national majority. Who knows what the result would have been with different campaigns aimed at winning the popular vote. It is disingenuous and weak to try and change the terms of the contest after losing it.)

In the past Trump has said and done many things that most of us would regard as crass and sexist. Even during the campaign some of his references to Clinton were, to use a word, deplorable.

Yet if feminists want to rail against injustices to women, there are far more pressing issues around the globe than oafishness in the Oval Office; especially when you recall that Clinton defended her own husband when he was exposed for exploiting and harassing women from that same presidential office.

Whether it is female genital mutilation, forced marriages, rights to education and work, domestic violence and even the right to show faces in public, there is no shortage of outrageous subjugation of women around the world, with elements of it replicated even in Western democracies such as the US.

Protest against that.

Now we have Hollywood actors who live behind secure walls in multi-million-dollar mansions decrying increased fortification of the US border. And the stars of shallow, violent and amoral movies offer themselves as public arbiters of political morality. Spare us.

This is no defence of Trump — he has, after all, been a birther. But the protesters claim moral superiority. They claim higher aspirations.

If Trump grates with you — wait for him to do something in office and then criticise it.

Better still, if you are a US citizen, mobilise next time to vote for a better candidate in order to defeat him.

JERUSALEM — Israel announced a bold plan on Tuesday to construct 2,500 housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a decision made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just two days after he spoke with President Trump.

The move appears to be a clear sign that the Israelis no longer fear American criticism of settlement construction, which is condemned by most of the world.

For eight years, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies bristled at the harsh condemnations of settlement growth by the Obama administration, which referred to the Israeli communities as “illegitimate” and “an obstacle to peace.”

Trump, however, has signaled a more accommodating stance toward Israel. He has called for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and a potential future Palestinian state. Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a hard-line opponent of the two-state solution and a supporter of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

The Jewish settlements have grown to house more than 400,000 Jewish residents in the West Bank and more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem. The settlers believe that they are living on land granted to them by God and won in military victories against Arab armies hostile to the Jewish state.

Just days after President Trump entered the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lifted a ban on construction of new settlements in East Jerusalem. (Reuters)“We’re building — and will continue to build,” Netanyahu said Tuesday.

Netanyahu’s promise to grow the settlements comes a little more than a week after diplomats from 70 countries met in Paris and criticized settlement building as a threat to a two-state solution. In December, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning the settlements, and Secretary of State John F. Kerry spoke out against them in a speech after the U.N. vote.

Asked at his daily briefing whether Trump supported the newly approved construction, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that “Israel continues to be a huge ally of the United States,” and Trump “wants to grow closer with Israel to make sure it gets the full respect that it deserves in the Middle East.”

Referring to a Monday announcement of a February meeting with Netanyahu, Spicer said, “We’ll have a conversation with the prime minister.”

Lior Amihai, a leader of the Israeli watchdog group Settlement Watch, said the 2,500 units represented the largest expansion since U.S.-led peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel broke down in April 2014.

A view of construction work in Givat HaTamar neighborhood of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. (David Vaaknin/For The Washington Post)Amihai cautioned that the announcement of future homes for the settlers did not guarantee fast-track construction. For the units to be built, the government needs to publish tenders and accept bids from builders.

But the potential sites could carry deep political resonance in the United States.

About 100 of the possible new units are in Beit El, a West Bank settlement supported by Friedman. The family of Trump’s son-in-law and newly appointed White House adviser Jared Kushner has donated to the charities that support Beit El.

Palestinians called the Israeli move a possible sign of more vigorous settlement construction.

“It is evident that Israel is exploiting the inauguration of the new American administration to escalate its violations and the prevention of any existence of a Palestinian state,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the Israeli plans undermine efforts to bring peace to the Middle East and will promote extremism.

The spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, called on the international community to take a “real and serious position” against Israel’s plans.

Jordan’s information minister, Mohammed al-Momani, said the settlement plan “deals a tough blow to efforts to revive the peace process.”

The Europeans also expressed their concern. “It is regrettable that Israel is proceeding with this policy, despite the continuous serious international concern and objections, which have been constantly raised at all levels,” the European Union’s diplomatic service said Tuesday.

During the Obama administration, settlement construction announcements came under increasingly bitter criticism, with the State Department suggesting that the moves undermined Middle East peace and raised questions about Netanyahu’s true commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

“We are returning to normal life in Judea and Samaria,” Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in a statement announcing the plans, using the biblical terms for the West Bank.

The meat industry’s spirited attempt to persuade Australians to unite around a plate of lamb has come unstuck. Meat and Livestock Australia’s annual Australia Day campaign has ditched Sam Kekovich’s familiar rants against the long-haired tofu-munchers and the anti-Australianism that has infected our national day.

Instead, they’ve gone for diversity and inclusion. Never mind terra nullius; surely we all agree that there’s nowhere better for a barbecue.

The keepers of indigenous rage are furious. Nakkiah Lui ­demands “a more accurate ­portrayal” of history that includes state-enforced genocide, segregation, oppression, that sort of thing. Luke Pearson on SBS’s ­taxpayer-funded platform says accuracy would be improved by feeding Aboriginals meat laced with strychnine.

Welcome to the dismal world of identity politics, where history is not a quest to discover shared truths but a loaded weapon to avenge ancestral wrongs.

Stan Grant blundered into this fatalistic territory 15 months ago when he was invited to speak to the motion “racism is killing the Australian dream” at a debate ­televised by the BBC.

Racism was “the very foundation of the dream”, Grant said. “When British people looked at us, they saw something sub­human … we were ﬂy-blown, Stone Age savages.” Grant discovered the last quote in a satirical essay by Charles Dickens, The Noble ­Savage. Dickens, like Meat and Livestock Australia, made the ­mistake of using irony, a rhetorical device lost on today’s readers.

Grant was warming to the theme. “Every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s ­history,” he said.

The speech was widely viewed on the internet and praised by ­lovers of historical misery porn. The Sydney Morning Herald compared him to Martin Luther King.

Yet it was a speech that puzzled many of us who attended the event, including a businesswoman from India, who struggled to recognise her adopted country in Grant’s dismal description. She knew Australia as a land of opportunity and redemption, an experience common to most ­migrants since 1788, and possibly before.

Grant has developed his own misgivings about the speech, or at least its reception on the activist fringe. “That so many have sought to break my words into pieces and deploy only those that best suit them speaks of the age of the ­politics of identity,” he writes in a self-reflective contribution to Quarterly Essay.

He fears he may have perpetuated “a lazy narrative” of a people paralysed by history, unwittingly obscuring the true story of individual triumph against adversity.

The essay will make uncomfortable reading for the ­merchants of intergenerational victimhood; the notion that ­ancestral trauma is a debilitating inherited condition. Present damage caused by historical wrongs became a fashionable cause in Canadian indigenous politics in the 1990s, and Kevin Rudd’s acclaimed apology to indigenous Australians unwittingly encouraged its importation to Australia.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Tom Calma called for the healing of “cumulative trauma” in a 2008 report, Beyond the Apology.

Indigenous Australians “have experienced trauma as a result of colonisation, dispossession and dislocation, as well as the trauma of ongoing racism, family violence and other events”, wrote Calma, citing as his authority a little-known emeritus professor by the name of Judy Atkinson.

The past cannot be changed, and memories of the past are ­disputed. Some may indignantly believe that Australia’s racist past has been censored. Others feel equally aggrieved that our ­colonial settlers have been defamed and that their gifts to us — the rule of law, stable institutions and the spirit of progress — are too frequently ignored. At any rate, having decided that indigenous Australians are prisoners of ­history, human rights activists have little idea how they might be released. A heartfelt public ­apology clearly isn’t enough.

In his eagerness to correct an abstract historical injustice, Calma ignores a practical lesson of history; throwing money at a problem generally makes it worse.

Besides, those who define ­Aboriginals as victims of historical injustice have no interest in ­resolving the matter. Grievance is the fuel that powers identity ­politics and the cause that keeps the indigenous elite employed.

Hence the constant inflation of their demands. Rudd’s apology, the one John Howard wisely declined to deliver, was never going to be the end of the matter. Nor will constitutional recognition, in the unlikely event that a referendum ever gets off the ground.

Now they want a treaty — ­between whom hardly matters, nor what the treaty should say — so long as it affirms the victimhood of the permanently oppressed and shames their oppressors.

Grant, who spent some of last year touring the country as a member of the federally funded Referendum Council, admits to feeling “suffocated” by the “stiﬂing and demoralising” world of indigenous affairs. “It is too easy to become consumed to the point that one loses all perspective,” he writes. It is hard to move beyond grief when you are locked in a cycle of “sorry business … a monotonous drumbeat of funeral marches”.

“Remembrance doesn’t necessarily stop the past repeating; sometimes it may even ­impede reconciliation and true justice. It is right to remember, but is it also right to forget?”

Grant hopes his essay will destroy the belief that indigenous Australians are helpless victims and challenge the attitude that success is not “black”. Indeed, his journey from an itinerant, working class, regional background to a respected international career in journalism shows that ­redemption for all Australians lies within our own grasp. “What emerges is, in many ­respects, a typical economic ­migration story,” he writes. ­“Migrants look to what they have built, not what they have left ­behind.”

If anything is killing the ­Australian dream it’s not racism but the identity politics that leads to what US writer David Reiff ­describes in his latest book as “the overvaluing of collective memory and the undervaluing of history”.

Far from ensuring justice, says Reiff, it is “a formula for unending grievance and vendetta”.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Background

The most beautiful woman in the world? I think she was. Yes: It's Agnetha Fältskog

A beautiful baby is king -- with blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. How incorrect can you get?

Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair

Enough said

A face of Leftist hate: Cory Booker, (D-NJ)

There really is an actress named Donna Air. She seems a pleasant enough woman, though

What feminism has wrought:

There's actually some wisdom there. The dreamy lady says she is holding out for someone who meets her standards. The other lady reasonably replies "There's nobody there". Standards can be unrealistically high and feminists have laboured mightily to make them so

Some bright spark occasionally decides that Leftism is feminine and conservatism is masculine. That totally misses the point. If true, how come the vote in American presidential elections usually shows something close to a 50/50 split between men and women? And in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump won 53 percent of white women, despite allegations focused on his past treatment of some women.

Political correctness is Fascism pretending to be manners

Political Correctness is as big a threat to free speech as Communism and Fascism. All 3 were/are socialist.

The problem with minorities is not race but culture. For instance, many American black males fit in well with the majority culture. They go to college, work legally for their living, marry and support the mother of their children, go to church, abstain from crime and are considerate towards others. Who could reasonably object to such people? It is people who subscribe to minority cultures -- black, Latino or Muslim -- who can give rise to concern. If antisocial attitudes and/or behaviour become pervasive among a group, however, policies may reasonably devised to deal with that group as a whole

Black lives DON'T matter -- to other blacks. The leading cause of death among young black males is attack by other young black males

Leftist logic: There are allegedly no distinctions between groups of humans, yet we're still supposed to celebrate diversity.

Identity politics is a form of racism

'White Privilege'. .. Oh yes. .. That was abundant in the Irish potato famines. ... And in the Scottish Highland Clearances. ...And in transportations to Australia. ... And in Workhouses. ... 'White privilege' was absolutely RIFE!

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves. Leftist motivations are fundamentally Fascist. They want to "fundamentally transform" the lives of their fellow citizens, which is as authoritarian as you can get. We saw where it led in Russia and China. The "compassion" that Leftists parade is just a cloak for their ghastly real motivations

Occasionally I put up on this blog complaints about the privileged position of homosexuals in today's world. I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings back and homosexuals are treated as equals before the law. To a simple Leftist mind, that makes me "homophobic", even though I have no fear of any kind of homosexuals.

But I thought it might be useful for me to point out a few things. For a start, I am not unwise enough to say that some of my best friends are homosexual. None are, in fact. Though there are two homosexuals in my normal social circle whom I get on well with and whom I think well of.

Of possible relevance: My late sister was a homosexual; I loved Liberace's sense of humour and I thought that Robert Helpmann was marvellous as Don Quixote in the Nureyev ballet of that name.

One may say that the person who gets in trouble with drugs is just as dumb without them

I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.

I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take children away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass

The genetics of crime: I have been pointing out for some time the evidence that there is a substantial genetic element in criminality. Some people are born bad. See here, here, here, here (DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12581) and here, for instance"

Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"

Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

So why do Leftists say "There is no such thing as right and wrong" when backed into a rhetorical corner? They say it because that is the predominant conclusion of analytic philosophers. And, as Keynes said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".

One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.

A modern feminist complains: "We are so far from “having it all” that “we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4am”."

Patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).

The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin

"An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms. You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing" -- SOURCE

Although it is a popular traditional chant, the "Kol Nidre" should be abandoned by modern Jewish congregations. It was totally understandable where it originated in the Middle Ages but is morally obnoxious in the modern world and vivid "proof" of all sorts of antisemitic stereotypes

What the Bible says about homosexuality:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination" -- Lev. 18:22

In his great diatribe against the pagan Romans, the apostle Paul included homosexuality among their sins:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.... Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" -- Romans 1:26,27,32.

So churches that condone homosexuality are clearly post-Christian

Although I am an atheist, I have great respect for the wisdom of ancient times as collected in the Bible. And its condemnation of homosexuality makes considerable sense to me. In an era when family values are under constant assault, such a return to the basics could be helpful. Nonetheless, I approve of St. Paul's advice in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans that it is for God to punish them, not us. In secular terms, homosexuality between consenting adults in private should not be penalized but nor should it be promoted or praised. In Christian terms, "Gay pride" is of the Devil

The homosexuals of Gibeah (Judges 19 & 20) set in train a series of events which brought down great wrath and destruction on their tribe. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out when it would not disown its homosexuals. Are we seeing a related process in the woes presently being experienced by the amoral Western world? Note that there was one Western country that was not affected by the global financial crisis and subsequently had no debt problems: Australia. In September 2012 the Australian federal parliament considered a bill to implement homosexual marriage. It was rejected by a large majority -- including members from both major political parties. The tide turned in 2017, however, with a public vote authorizing homosexual marriage in Australia

Religion is deeply human. The recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization. Early civilizations were at any rate all very religious. Atheism is mainly a very modern development and is even now very much a minority opinion

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

I think it's not unreasonable to see Islam as the religion of the Devil. Any religion that loves death or leads to parents rejoicing when their children blow themselves up is surely of the Devil -- however you conceive of the Devil. Whether he is a man in a red suit with horns and a tail, a fallen spirit being, or simply the evil side of human nature hardly matters. In all cases Islam is clearly anti-life and only the Devil or his disciples could rejoice in that.

And there surely could be few lower forms of human behaviour than to give abuse and harm in return for help. The compassionate practices of countries with Christian traditions have led many such countries to give a new home to Muslim refugees and seekers after a better life. It's basic humanity that such kindness should attract gratitude and appreciation. But do Muslims appreciate it? They most commonly show contempt for the countries and societies concerned. That's another sign of Satanic influence.

And how's this for demonic thinking?: "Asian father whose daughter drowned in Dubai sea 'stopped lifeguards from saving her because he didn't want her touched and dishonoured by strange men'

Islamic terrorism isn’t a perversion of Islam. It’s the implementation of Islam. It is not a religion of the persecuted, but the persecutors. Its theology is violent supremacism.

And where Muslims tell us that they love death, the great Christian celebration is of the birth of a baby -- the monogenes theos (only begotten god) as John 1:18 describes it in the original Greek -- Christmas!

No wonder so many Muslims are hostile and angry. They have little companionship from women and not even any companionship from dogs -- which are emotionally important in most other cultures. Dogs are "unclean"

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here